


this wide quietness

by aliferlia



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: M/M, unabashed fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:59:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I felt quite acutely the troubles of a human child in love with a god."</p>
            </blockquote>





	this wide quietness

**Author's Note:**

> there comes a time in every Havemercy fan’s life when they must attempt to write sickeningly fluffy first-time Hal/Royston set when Royston comes back to Hal after he fucks off to the Ke-Han like two seconds after not dying of magical plague and guess what THIS IS THAT. title from John Keats' Ode to Psyche because it makes me cry.

**HAL**

Scattered throughout the pages of the big green leatherbound book that lives on the left-hand side of the mantelpiece in the study is a story that I love more than any other. The author, a very serious old lady by all accounts, could not be bothered take the time to write it out in words, and even now I am not certain that the illustrator did not put it in only as an afterthought: for it is not a story in its own right, nor even a poem, nor a fairytale nor a footnote. Each chapter in that book, you understand, is very beautifully illustrated with sharp black shapes of ink, and each of the five expensive watercolour plates is bordered with the images of fronded branches and dark fruit, flowers and hidden birds: here a creeping child, a sleeping fawn, snakes and sprites and foxes, ants and demons.

At first I thought these vignettes wholly secondary to the stories themselves, until one afternoon I began quite by accident to pick out a figure who reappeared over and over again, creeping from the borders of one illustration to another, crossing over the division from chapter to chapter, hovering timidly about the edge of a hundred other heroes’ triumphs and misfortunes yet never plucking up the courage to enter into any story of her own: the fine-inked figure of a girl, winged and girdled, who carried in one hand a magic box. I sat wondering a long while with that book in my hands, turning back and forth to catalogue her every appearance. Sometimes she appeared in the company of a winged boy who carried alone: she appeared to have two cruel friends who abandoned her: most often she tended to hurt birds or lost children. Once, in the corner of beautiful sketch showing two knights fighting to the death, she appeared with her hand cupped around a candleflame.

‘Look,’ I said to Royston, when he came home that day - for this was before the war ended, when he and I were still unsure of what we were to each other, and I anxious and eager and miserable all at once with the welter of love in my chest. ‘Look - look, isn’t strange? What do think her name is?’

Smiling, he told me the story of Cupidon and Psyché. ‘It was a Ramanthine tale, you understand,’ he added when he had done, by way of historical context. ‘It was an old, old Ramanthine folktale - they had all sorts of beautiful folksongs about it, and of course the great Ramanthine epic _Psyché_  was based on it, although it’s lost now. Volstov tried its best to supress it. I suppose the illustrator must have had a fondness for it and tried to sneak it in. I’d never noticed it at all before now. You really are a wonder, Hal.’

I was sitting at his feet, as I always did when he told me stories, even then: and I remember how as his fingers crept down to card softly through my hair I pressed my face into the crease of his trousers and felt as though I could barely breathe for longing. ‘It’s only because I spend too much time looking at picture-books,’ I mumbled, red-faced.

‘Exactly!’ he said, bracingly. ‘A sharp eye and a love for whimsy have all too often brought kingdoms to their knees, you know. I advise you to spend too much time looking at picture-books as often as you can, and leave the boring work to the old boring fools like myself who are already half-blind.’

‘You’re not old,’ I told him, looking up into his face and thrilling to find his dark eyes already on me. ‘Or boring. You’re not old or boring at _all_.’

His eyes softened in the most wonderful way. I had never thought that anybody would look at me like that: my face blazed hot as he brushed a knuckle gently against my cheek, just once. ‘You cannot deny that I am a fool, though,’ he said, and then very suddenly he was up and about, reaching down to yank me to my feet and leaving go of my hands without the barest trace of sentimentality, striding cheerfully from the room, saying, ‘Now, then, what do you think we should have for dinner?’

I remember I put the book carefully aside. I think I dreamed of that story that night, and many nights afterwards: of the small lonely human child chosen by a god, of how she lost him and won him back again after terrible trials with her own bravery. If there had been any trials in the world, no matter how perilous, that could have brought me to Royston’s side, or convinced him that I was even the littlest bit brave or worth loving.

**ROYSTON**

_Go to the house_ , I had said to Hal before I left, and, _Sleep_ : and so, it seemed, he had. I hardly believed that he had spent all ten days of my absence asleep, but as I came upon him in the cold hours of what promised to be a clear and peaceful day, he was so profoundly unconscious that I would not have been too surprised to think that he had not stirred once from where he lay: asleep where he had fallen, pitched headlong across my bed, and curled up very close in a tangle of deep linens. He had completely forgotten to remove his left shoe. I knelt down to unbuckle it and set it carefully aside: leant over him and wrapped the blankets closer around his shoulders, kissed his forehead and his sleeping eyes: then went to draw a very hot bath, three o’ clock in the morning or not, because I had been travelling through the Cobalts for the better part of the past two days, badly shaken by the ruin and the anguish that we had found at Lapis, and was filthy and exhausted beyond bearing.

I must, at some point, have crawled back into bed, for I woke a scant few hours later to a grey dawn and the first sunlight golding the folds of the blankets, my feet quite uncomfortably tangled up with Hal’s and my right hand crushed completely numb by the weight of his shoulder. I sat up, thick-headed and stiff-necked, and drew in a long heavy yawn as I stared down at the curl of his fingers and tried to understand what I ought to say to him. It had been easy when we were astonished at simply being alive and together. I could not regret kissing him: I would never regret it, I decided, very sternly: and yet I could not understand how we were to progress, either. His hair was written with gold like a holy relic: I reached out and pushed it back from his face, marked the freckles on his cheekbones.

He stirred. Suddenly impulsive, I bent to kiss him awake: first his temple, then each eye, then his nose and his cheeks and the corners of his lips. He caught at my fingers, groaning, and batted me away like a cat: then, when I started to move away, pulled and pulled at my wrists and fairly clung to me, saying something that sounded an awful lot like, ‘Warm.’

‘You know, when I told you to go to sleep, I meant in your own bed,’ I murmured against his temple.

‘Oh!’ he said, and sat up so suddenly he very nearly smacked me in the face: I dodged and raised a wry eyebrow at him, which was the better alternative to simpering over him like a lovemad fool. ‘Oh, Royston, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean - this is terribly improper of me, I shouldn’t have - only I just - well, I missed you, so I sort of got into the habit of - it won’t -’ He stopped. His hair was sticking up in cowlicks all over the place: his eyes were wide and grey in his cool-shadowed face. Somewhere outside a pair of doves had begun to churr and coo in the early cold. He said, ‘But you’re _here_.’

‘I am, indeed, here,’ I agreed, and put my hands to his lapels, ran my thumbs along the thick embroidery: for he was wearing a jacket. I wanted to laugh in sheer adoration before remembering that that would be a very silly and besotted thing to do. ‘And you are still wearing yesterday’s clothes, it seems. In addition to being terribly uncomfortable, don’t you think it’s a shame to crease such nice -’

He cut me off with a kiss. His mouth was bitter with sleep: his elbows knocked painfully against mine as he struggled out from the tangle of sheets to find a less complicated angle: and yet with all their clumsiness, still his fingers at my throat set my heart shuddering. I hooked my hands into the lapels of his jacket and pulled him up onto his knees, and he followed willingly, tumbling into my lap quite unashamedly and slipping his fingers into my hair when I locked my arms around his waist to hold him giddyingly warm and near.

‘Good morning,’ I managed, when at last he subsided, breathing quite heavily: pressed his forehead to mine, let his hands fall to clutch at my shirt. The weight of him was solid and shaking and hot, the press and press of his breath against me  the only real thing I had known in what felt like years. Still I feared to do something ‘You really did miss me, didn’t you?’

He swallowed, fingers fiddling with a button at my collar. I loved his hands, I decided: I loved the way he bit his lower lip, the way his freckles stood out all the sharper against his pale skin in the ghostly light of dawn. I was silly and I was besotted and I was every other self-despising word I with my not unimpressive vocabulary could have listed, and yet in that moment I could not have told him a single one of them.

‘Only a little bit,’ he tried, very bravely, ‘only when I needed somebody to explode the pigeons.’

‘The pigeons, hmm?’

‘They’re a dreadful nuisance,’ he said, accusingly, as though it were all my fault.

I laughed in ludicrous delight. ‘Oh, I don’t doubt it, but don’t you think exploding them is a bit harsh?’ I asked. ‘Surely only a light brazing would be in order.’ He drew in a small gulping breath that was at least half a laugh, and I smiled, very pleased: kissed the corner of his eye, beamed when he ducked his head, bit his lip, smiled the littlest bit. I knotted our fingers together. ‘I am sorry to have gone gallivanting off like that, but they shan’t want me again for a long while yet, I don’t think. What would you like to do first? I think breakfast is in order, don’t -’

I was cut off when he kissed me, hard and clumsy and eager. Knocked off balance, I fell back a little way, the bedsprings creaking beneath me. He took the opportunity to straddle my legs, cradling my head in his hands to kiss me deeper. I could not remember why I had ever sought to protest this: it was everything I had ever wanted. Aching from the long days of travel, still a good deal shaken by the devastation I had witnessed in the ruined city, I lay back against the tangled bedsheets. The war was ended: we had won.

A little morning breeze slipped in around the edges of the casement and set the hair at the nape of my neck prickling.

**HAL**

To this day people ask me about what it was like to save the city, and to this day I cannot answer them with any great confidence. There is no clarity to my memories of the time when Royston was locked up in the Basquiat: those first few hours when I learned of his illness and tried to get in to see him are wholly black with misery, as though someone had spilled ink across a page. I suppose to anybody else it would seem very romantic, my staying at his side while he was in danger of wasting away entirely, but what little I do remember of it was terrible and grey and full of panic. I barely understood what it meant that he had kissed me until days afterward, when he had already left for Lapis. I had been far too staggered by the impossible weight of relief that he had survived to think of anything beyond that.

In the days when I waited, alone, in his house, I remember I began to grow terribly superstitious. Rumour lay thick over the city like smoke, and since the morning papers themselves were all suspiciously quiet about what was happening across the mountains, I had to rely on hearsay from the paperboys, from the neighbours, from the gossiping women in the bakery. That we had won the war everyone knew. Reports varied as to what had become of the dragons and their riders: on hearing the latest popular report, that they had all perished, I remember thinking with dread of Airman Balfour, who had been so kind to me and to Thom, and then of Thom himself, and of the curious affinity that I had noted between him and Airman Rook. Everyone seemed very sure that the troops we had sent in were there merely to assist with peacekeeping and recovery. Everyone seemed very sure that there would be no more fighting.

All the same, I swung distractedly between fits of dread and giddy impatience. I had nothing to do but read and wait for him, and so read I did. I turned most often to fairytales, as I always did when I was lonely: I picked out with new sympathy the little forgotten figure ofPsyché as she crept silent through thorns and deserts to findher Cupidon again. I remembered over and over again how, as Royston had slept fitfully during his sickness, shuddering with the same fever that had left his pillows dark with sweat, I had sat beside him, keeping watch as long as I could: and how, nodding once into sleep, I had let slip the little oil-lamp and spilled a few drops onto Royston’s shoulder.

Left alone with my superstitions, I could not help but take it as a sign. Three days after that, he had been gone.

**ROYSTON**

I had forgotten, or had coaxed myself quite carefully into forgetting, the weight of a body over my own, the taste of a warm willing mouth, the little breathing sounds. That they were _his_ left me astonished: I catalogued with infinite wonder the particular curve of his spine, the sharp lines of his shoulder blades, the small bones at his wrists. I felt just as I had when he had on one greatly unexpected day taken an old book of fairy-stories down from its accustomed place on the mantelpiece and pointed out to me a hidden series from the _Cupidon and Psyché_ story tucked away in the borders of each illustration: staggered that something I had thought I had known through and through could still hold some wonders. I had had years and years to learn all the ways a beloved body may speak, but I had yet to hear him read those words: and similarly, I had made an exhaustive study of all his ways, of the fall of his hair, the blue of his eyes, the curve of his lips, yet never known what it was to slip my thumb into the hollow of his throat and feel the skin there soft and heated, to bite at his lip and hear his breathing stutter.

For a long while we simply lay there as the sun rose gold over the rooftops of Thremedon and a morning wind began to move through the leaves of the plane trees outside: the flight of birds barred the light. It drenched him through with brilliance, edging his hair with gold and soaking into his skin, so that above me he might have been a young god built in bronze. The sheer unlikeliness of the events that had brought him here to me still seemed almost ludicrous: scant months ago we had been bowed over illegal volumes of poetry by the light of the Nevers moon. I had not supposed it would prove to be anything more than another one of my ill-advised infatuations. Contrary to everything I had ever learned about life, I had been right to trust.

He kissed me again and again, countless times, until we were both of us breathless and intent. Quite suddenly the touch of his hands had grown hot and impetuous, the press of his fingers to my waist altogether impatient: quite suddenly his lips had found my throat and bitten down just in the hollow of my neck, so that I could only close my eyes and arch back with a groan I had not meant to give. He bit down again, so skilfully that I could barely even begin to be astonished. His fingers clutched again at the folds of my shirt: moved lower, then lower still, until they were tugging at the waistband of my trousers.

Suddenly unsure, I sat up, discovering with no small amount of displeasure that I was breathing quite disgracefully hard: pushed his hands away, said, ‘Hal - Hal, wait -’

Immediately he drew back: sat on his haunches, tucked his hair back behind his ears, swallowed hard. ‘I - sorry,’ he stammered, his eyes wide, his face pinker than I had ever seen it. His chest was heaving. I had to grit my teeth at the sight of him. ‘I should have - I should have asked, or - please, forgive me -’

I shook my head, feeling, to be precise, like something of an ass. I needed to _think_ , and that was proving to be excruciatingly difficult with him so close and so obviously aroused: one glance at his trousers was enough to set me swallowing, my mouth suddenly dry. I pressed a thumb to the bridge of my forehead, closed my eyes. I hated to think of his being made ashamed of his desires in an way, and most particularly because of my own foolish ideas of propriety and chivalry. He wanted me, that much was clear: and I wanted him, very, very badly. It is a tremendously difficult thing to be rational about sex, particularly when a lifetime of very foolish decisions and disappointed hopes have left one convinced that one is not only bad luck, but also wholly unworthy of anything approaching _good_ luck: but for his sake, I supposed, I would have to try.

Feeling very much like the old ungraceful fool I was, I got up onto my knees: slipped the jacket from his shoulders and cast it aside, began unbuttoning his shirt, hands heavy throughout with adoration. He held quite still throughout, save for how he shivered at my touch, and when I noticed this I pressed my advantage with all the skill I had, cupping his elbows in my palms, laying my thumbs to the delicate skin at his wrist, tracing the lines of his hips until he was breathing in short gasps, lips parted and fists clenched, the front of his trousers in quite a state. When he was bare from the waist up, arms pricked with gooseflesh in the little wind that blew sweet and clear from the window, I dropped my head to his shoulders, kissing the freckles there as I had imagined doing in every ridiculously and sentimental daydream I had ever entertained about him, and took his tense hands into my own: brought them gently to my waistband.

He froze.

**HAL**

I had thought of him in that way before, of course: I thought of kissing him nearly all the time, and of doing far more. That he seemed so anxious not to made me feel terribly foolish. For all that he had seemed to care for me in the country, for all that he had insisted so strongly on my accompanying him to Thremedon, still I second-guessed my purpose in his household almost daily. He had called me his assistant only, had set very careful rules as to how I might touch him in public, had shown me barely any sign of affection. I accepted this as a matter of propriety, and was careful never to seem presumptuous or overbearing. I attempted to understand his reasoning as best I could. Not only was I so young that I could see how someone more callous might accuse him simply of taking advantage of me, I was beginning to understand that there festered in him a streak of self-hatred that I had never been able to understand. He did not think that he deserved to be happy, I supposed. It was a puzzling way of thinking. I could not imagine how to remedy it save through loving him.

For all my attempts at being sensible, certain irrational, and selfish fears remained. I could not bear the thought of being a burden to him: if I had discovered that were keeping me about only out of pity, I would have wanted nothing more than to remove myself instantly rather than cause him any discomfort. I could not bear to think that he had tired of me already and was regretting his decision to bring me to the city in the first place, but I could not help it.

Even after he kissed me in the way that only a dying man can, still I had my fears. I wandered from room to room in his absence, elated and full of dread and vindicated and hesitant all at once, reading fairytales until I could barely keep my eyes open. I felt marginalised in a city full of industry and turmoil, a small unknown shadow who could do nothing brave and nothing useful. In sleepless moments I would try childishly to imagine how I might go about performing divine trials in order to prove myself to him. Nothing was ever so easy or so concrete as it would have been in a story. To visit hell would have been quite easy in comparison to sorting through the silly human muddle of our feelings. To me it was still a strange thing to be wanted at all: I felt quite acutely the troubles of a human child in love with a divine hero.

**ROYSTON**

The white roar of the city’s customary babble was starting up: cartwheels clattering, doors slamming, arguments brewing. Far above it all, alone in the quiet of my sunlit room amid the rustling of the golden leaves outside, we waited there, he and I, as I suppose a good many other lovers must have. His fingers hesitated over the buttons of my trousers.

‘Do you really want me to?’ he asked, hesitant and rough, so that my heart ached sharp in my chest.

‘I do,’ I said, into his shoulder, and to own to it was like releasing a long-held breath. I was not taking advantage of him, I reminded myself, and as though to affirm it to myself, I looked up, clear into his eyes: smiled to comfort him when I saw the fear of rejection in his face. ‘I always have. I’m sorry I spent so long letting you think that I didn’t. Even more so than that, I’m - I’m sorry that I didn’t trust that you knew what you wanted.’

‘I understand why you didn’t,’ Hal said, earnestly. ‘I do, truly I do, and it was - it was very decent of you.’

I felt guiltier than ever: he should not have to make excuses for my own silliness. It had hardly been decency - _some misguided, self-ennobling sense of chivalry_ , I wanted to elaborate, scathingly.

I don’t know if he caught the self-loathing in my face, however, for quite suddenly he seemed to steel himself: a rare look of determination came into his eyes, and he lifted his jaw as though in defiance. ‘I want to care for you, Royston,’ he told me, looking me square in the eye: put his palms flat to my hips. ‘I won’t ever do anything to betray you. I know I’m very - well, I’m just - I’m very me, but - I want to care for you, and be good to you. You’re a good man, truly you are: the best I know, the dearest and bravest and most wonderful - but you aren’t always good to yourself, and I hate that, but I can’t change it. What I can do is be good to you when, when you’re being hard on yourself.’ He let out a deep breath: dropped his gaze quite suddenly, but managed all the same to say, ‘For you to be happy - that’s all I want. That’s the only thing I want.’

I swallowed. A terribly curious sensation had begun in my chest, worse than the ache of longing, warmer than desire. I had not thought it possible to be any more ludicrously besotted with him than I already was. ‘Well, I was made rather acutely aware of that when you single-handedly led the Dragon Corps to the Esar for my sake,’ I said, archly as I could, by way of bluster: marshalled all my words and dry wit to my service in order to add, half as though it did not matter, ‘Since this seems as good a time as any, however, I suppose I ought to make this clear. I am in love with you, you know: very, very much in love with you, and I hope never to give you reason to doubt that again.’

‘Oh,’ Hal said, rather helplessly. He seemed completely taken aback. That it came as a surprise to him at all only served to remind me how foolish I had been, and how selfish, and I said as much: but for all I cursed myself, from the way that he looked at me in that moment, I could almost believe that I was the sort of man who deserved this.

In the next moment he was kissing me again, not at all gently, but with more vigour and determination that I would have believed possible. I remember I groaned and fell back against the sheets, letting him push me down: then he was over me, unbuttoning my shirt as quickly as he could, so quickly that I nearly laughed, amused by his eagerness. Seeing the grin on my face, he kissed me again more firmly, as though to forestall any jibes. Any remarks I might have made were in any case strangled in my throat the moment his fingers slipped below my waistband. I hurried to unbutton his trousers in return: took him in hand and was left breathless when he gasped.

It was not at all strange to be naked to him: his skin was fiercely hot to the touch, so heavily flushed that even his straining shoulders were pink in the light of dawn. I remember how his arms shook at first as he moved above me, how he would lean down to kiss my eyes as often as he could. The expressions on his face were quite marvellous to watch: his eyes seemed very dark, his lips bitten almost bloody. I put my arms around his waist, dug my nails deep into his shoulders, and was driven nearly to oblivion when he cried out at my touch.

There was a space of time afterwards in which I remember lying with him pressed close and hot in my arms, both of us breathing in great heavy gasps. I had known this before, although I knew that he had not, and the novelty of knowing that was enough to reinvent it as a small strange wonder in my own eyes. I stroked his hair, and his shoulders, and the cruves of his elbows: looked blearily down into his face and felt my chest ache when I saw him smiling up at me. Surely not even someone so cynical and full of ill-tempers as myself could ruin him. I suppose I had thought him the kind of precarious idyll that never holds up to a second reading, a favourite childhood book dimly remembered that must never at all costs be read again for fear of it being quite destroyed by adult disillusionment. He was nothing of the sort. He was a bold romance to be read again and again and cherished all the more each time, a great epic that strengthened the soul.

‘You will have to tell me all about what happened at Lapis,’ he said eventually, pressed so close against me that I could feel his lips frame the words against my throat. ‘And then we’ll have to talk very seriously about you almost dying and then running away to warzones.’

I grinned up at the ceiling. The first flush of gold had faded from the room, but the warmth of the day was already creeping in. ‘Bad habit of mine, is it?’ I asked.

He nodded solemnly against me. ‘A terribly impolite one,’ he reprimanded me, fingers curling and uncurling just beneath my heartbeat.

I gave a small breath of laughter, still too dizzy and breathless to think very clearly. ‘After breakfast,’ I assured him, closing my eyes again.

‘Oh!’ he said, sitting bolt upright, so that I gave a great groan and rolled over, trying to bury my face in the nearest pillow. ‘Breakfast! You must be starving! What would you like?’

‘Lightly-brazed pigeon, naturally,’ I murmured, dragging a sheet over my head. ‘Hal, for Bastion’s sake, we’re not all twenty years old. Let me have ten minutes.’

He laughed aloud: found a space of bare skin at the nape of my neck that was free from the tangle of eiderdowns and kissed it. ‘You can have as long as you like,’ he said, ‘so long as you come down to breakfast eventually.’

**HAL**

He noticed, in the way that he did only with books, that I had been reading it particularly often: I supposed I had set it back in place just an inch to the right, or left one page the littlest bit dog-eared despite my best efforts. How he kept stock of books that he habitually left lying about in the most outlandish of places I could not have guessed, but he managed it all the same.

‘You really are fond of this one, aren’t you?’ he asked, on the evening of his return: slipped into bed with me quite naked and settled the book into my lap.

‘I read it while you were away,’ I explained, flushing a little: but a great deal more because of the warmth of his chest behind me, and the press of his arms to mine, than because I felt silly to have been taking solace in fairytales. He had never scorned me for reading them in the past, and surely wouldn’t now. He thought me worthwhile: he loved me. He had said so, and I believed it. In that moment, at least, I felt a good deal less useless and childish than I usually did.

‘It’s the one with those lovely Psyché pictures hidden away in the illustrations, isn’t it?’ he checked, as though he already knew the answer: knotted his fingers with my own where they rested on the borders of my favourite picture of all, the one of the lonely knight struck down from his starry horse even after he had killed his monster. Even there, working her way steadily about the margins, was the figure of Psyché, waiting patiently beside a well.

‘I just - I would like very much to read the original, that epic that you mentioned,’ I said, not liking to explain in more detail: not liking to talk of how powerless and lost I had felt those past ten days when just at that moment I felt stronger and better than I had ever been.

‘I did think you might, yes,’ he said, kissing my shoulder: and, leaning over, retrieved from the night stand a very thin book of red leather, stamped with ornate curlicues and lettered _Chanson de Psyché_ in an ornate Old Ramanthine script. ‘Would you like to start, or shall I?’


End file.
